Just a Reminder That Trumpcare is Part of a Targeted Effort to Gut Health Care

The Trumpcare CBO report is out and it's bad, but I keep circling back to this icky little aside from Kellyanne Conway, whose gift for spin knows no bounds, despite having outlasted its usefulness post-election. She responded to a perfectly reasonable question from George Stephanopoulos by saying that people on Medicaid who are "able-bodied" and living "way above the poverty line" should just get jobs if they want to keep their health insurance, saying, "If they're able-bodied, and they want to work, then they'll have employer-sponsored benefits like you and I do."

Just one problem, there, Kellyanne: People living "way above the poverty line" AREN'T ON MEDICAID. The Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion doesn't include people living "way" over the poverty line. It includes adults at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty line. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, that's $27,821 for a family of three. So, you know, pretty damn close to the poverty line.

Conway's spin also ignores the existence of working people who are Medicaid-eligible based on their incomes—in my first job out of grad school, that was me. Her argument is flippantly disingenuous, and given that Trumpcare is primed to have repercussions even for those of us on insurance plans through our employers, it's also evasive.

But what's chilling about it is that it isn't aberrant nonsense from a spin-loving aide. It's in line with Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price's stance on birth control, and it's very much in line with Seema Verma's approach to Medicaid. Verma, who President Grabbyhands selected to run Medicaid, is known for imposing a work requirement on Medicaid recipients in Indiana.

So, sure, maybe Conway was just being obtuse here, but what she said fits into the Trump administration's pattern of framing health care not as a right but as a privilege contingent upon certain "good" behaviors. Statements like this compounded by awful policy make it increasingly clear that the Trump administration—and the GOP more broadly—does not consider health care a human right.